The Barrelfish Operating System

Barrelfish is a new research operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK. We are exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems. We are motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.

For more information, please read our research papers below and see the FAQ.

People

Barrelfish hackers and friends, Zurich, August 2009

From the ETH Zurich Systems Group:

• Andrew Baumann
• Simon Peter
• Jan Rellermeyer
• Timothy Roscoe
• Adrian Schüpbach
• Akhilesh Singhania

From Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley:

• Paul Barham
• Rebecca Isaacs
• Vijayan Prabhakaran

From Microsoft Research, Cambridge:

• Richard Black
• Tim Harris
• Orion Hodson
• Ross McIlroy

Past interns, students, and contributors:

• Pierre-Evariste Dagand
• Ankush Gupta
• Raffaele Sandrini
• Dario Simone
• Animesh Trivedi

Friends and collaborators:

• Gustavo Alonso
• Tom Anderson
• Matthias Gries

Publications

• Simon Peter, Adrian Schüpbach, Paul Barham, Andrew Baumann, Rebecca Isaacs, Tim Harris, and Timothy Roscoe. Design principles for end-to-end multicore schedulers. In 2nd Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism, Berkeley, CA, USA, June 2010. [ .pdf ]
• Andrew Baumann, Paul Barham, Pierre-Evariste Dagand, Tim Harris, Rebecca Isaacs, Simon Peter, Timothy Roscoe, Adrian Schüpbach, and Akhilesh Singhania. The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on OS Principles, Big Sky, MT, USA, October 2009. [ .pdf ]
• Pierre-Evariste Dagand, Andrew Baumann, and Timothy Roscoe. Filet-o-Fish: practical and dependable domain-specific languages for OS development. In 5th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS), Big Sky, MT, USA, October 2009. [ .pdf ]
• Andrew Baumann, Simon Peter, Adrian Schüpbach, Akhilesh Singhania, Timothy Roscoe, Paul Barham, and Rebecca Isaacs. Your computer is already a distributed system. Why isn't your OS? In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, Monte Verità, Switzerland, May 2009. [ .pdf ]
• Adrian Schüpbach, Simon Peter, Andrew Baumann, Timothy Roscoe, Paul Barham, Tim Harris, and Rebecca Isaacs. Embracing diversity in the Barrelfish manycore operating system. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Managed Many-Core Systems, Boston, MA, USA, June 2008. [ .pdf ]

Theses, reports, etc.

• Raffaele Sandrini. VMkit: A lightweight hypervisor library for Barrelfish. Master's thesis, ETH Zurich, September 2009. [ .pdf ]
• Dario Simone. Power management in a manycore operating system. Master's thesis, ETH Zurich, August 2009. [ .pdf ]
• Animesh Trivedi Hotplug in a multikernel operating system. Master's thesis, ETH Zurich, August 2009. [ .pdf ]
• Pierre-Evariste Dagand. Language Support for Reliable Operating Systems. Master's thesis, ENS Cachan-Bretagne – University of Rennes, France, June 2009. [ .pdf ]

Downloads

Barrelfish is released under the 3-clause BSD-style Open Source licence.

• Snapshot release, 2009-12-19
• First release snapshot, 2009-09-14

Mailing list

We have setup a mailing list where you can ask for help or help others working with Barrelfish. You will need to subscribe before posting to the list.

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